The Ten Rules of the Maximoff Household
by Clownfood
Summary: There were a couple of simple ground rules that everyone who lived in the Maximoff household had to oblige by. These, Magda told her children, were the unbreakable, unbending rules of their tiny universe and they should never ever stray from them. Ever. EVER. Except, they did, all the time. Short story about the struggle of raising super-powered kids. Slight DOFP-spoilers.


**Authors Notes:** I'm using the movieverse-canon so I'm calling Pietro Peter, assuming the small child is Lorna (and she's not Erics because she's too young) and according to Singer Wanda was supposed to be mentioned in the movie but that was cut out, so I'm assuming she exists as Peters twin. Using basically the back-story of Magda Eisenheart from the comics, except she didn't die or give the twins up.

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There were a couple of simple ground rules that everyone who lived in the Maximoff household had to oblige by. These, Magda told her children, were the unbreakable, unbending rules of their tiny universe and they should never ever stray from them. Ever. EVER.

The rules where even written down in her neat handwriting and posted on the fridge for everyone to see. To an outsider, not knowing what went on inside that occasionally quiet suburban home, they looked quite normal and easy to uphold.

**Rule Number 1:** No house guest unless they have been announced beforehand and approved by Mom.  
That included playdates, people from school who came by to drop of homework or the social workers, who seemed to be attracted to the Maximoff family like government moths to a flame. Anyone who showed up unannounced would not get inside the house. A couple of years later when Peter was in his mid teens Magda added an exception for police, since refusing them entry seemed to make them think she was hiding something. Which she was. But she didn't need them to know that.

**Rule Number 2:** No running in the house!  
A common rule by most standards and insanely hard to uphold for any family with energetic kids. For Magda it turned out to be an impossible rule to enforce, and - she realized - a kind of cruel and unusual torture for her son the times he chose to obey. So, like the first rule, modifications were made: "No running a_s fast as you can_ in the house". That at-least kept the drapes from being dragged down by the draft whenever Peter decided to grab a snack, which was around every 30 minutes. Which led into rule three.

**Rule Number 3:** No Unhealthy Snacks Between Meals  
Other mothers with teenage boys at one of Magdas three minimum-wage workplaces would complain about how their sons would just devour everything in the fridge three times a day. Magda often fantasized about calling them out on their bullshit, because of course THEIR sons didn't LITERARY empty the entire family food storage between school and dinnertime, but she never did.

However forcing her son to go hungry was not an option either - Magda had not escaped poverty in Europe to have her son starve in the states. That's why she had added the "unhealthy" part to the rule, because snacks with sugar and fast carbs was far more expensive than other dull more filling alternatives, thus not ruining the family economy completely on a weekly basis.

In hindsight mentioning the money-aspect of this to Peter had been a mistake, as it started the long era of ill-gotten store goods appearing in the cabinets, about 6 months later followed by their first visit from a police officer. Which lead to the addition of rule number five.

**Rule Number 5:** No Helping out with Money!  
Of course Magda would have LOVED if her kids decided to contribute to the household by going out and getting part time jobs, but that's not how they choose to try to help out financially. Instead, a large untraceable sum of money that no one could account for ended up on Magdas banking account, almost getting her into a fraud investigation before the money inexplicably disappeared again, as if it never had been there. After that she forbade her elder children to try to help out and for a while she had been a strict enforcer of rule 5.

But then came Lornas fifth birthday when they couldn't afford a party, and her class trip, which they of course couldn't pay for, and that time she ruined her winter jacket and Magda had to patch it horribly because there was no way to buy a new one that month. Unless, of course, no tv-sets magically disappeared from stores and money teleported itself into her coat pockets, which they had a tendency of doing. Magda couldn't find it in her heart to scold her children for being the only teenagers in existence to sneak money IN TO their mothers purse to prevent their youngest sister from having to go to school looking like a drifter.

**Rule Number 6:** Moms Word is the Unquestionable Law of the Universe!  
The few visitors Magda had would always laugh at that one, smiling at her and saying "They are quite a handful, aren't they?" in what they believed to be a shared experience of raising unruly children. To any other parent this seemed like a normal, if strict, disciplinary procedure, along the lines of the more commonly known "My house - my rules" that other parents so frequently used. Magda however simply thought writing "No re-writing the fabric reality!" might lead to too many questions being asked by outsiders. In the Maximoff household rule 6 would be utilized in phrases like "Get the furniture down from the ceiling right now, young lady!" or "There will be no vanishing doors in my house!" It was a rule that was by it's nature almost impossible to uphold.

**Rule Number 7:** Hand-holding means serious business!  
Her few visitors never asked her about that one from fear of embarrassing Magda, as they believed the sentence was simply some miss-translation of a Romanian expression. Her english wasn't perfect, after all.

Of all the rules this was the one Magda would not allow to be modified or broken in any way. When someone tried to grab Peters hand he was not allowed to withdraw it and as long as he was being held he needed to stay in one place and listen to whatever he was told. Of course he could have easily ducked away or gotten free, but the women in the family were very stern about this rule being kept. Otherwise it was impossible to tell whether or not Peter had actually been there for the duration of the conversation. Originally it was Wandas system set in place to deal with her brother, which was probably why he abided by it with minimal fuss (which, by anyone else's standards, was a lot of fuss). Magda had also issued Wanda an addition to this rule, which was not to use it to torture her brother, by for example needlessly dragging out conversations, or speaking unnecessarily slow, which she would occasionally do just to annoy him.

**Rule Number 8:** In Case of Danger - Run  
Magda was a runner. She had successfully escaped the soldiers that took the rest of her family away, the country that hated her and the United States of Americas immigration officers for eight years. She was ready to give up everything and get out at a moments notice and she tried to pass that on to her children. Over and over again she had told them that if anything out of the ordinary happened (Wanda had in later years pointed out that "out of the ordinary" was not a good point of measurement when it came to the Maximoff household) they should simply run.

This was repeated as a mantra along the lines of how other parents told their children not to take candy from strangers (Peters favorite pastime, especially if the stranger wasn't aware he was offering it). Sometimes she worried she might be making her children needlessly skittish, but after Peter and Wanda had grown into their powers she decided it was for the best, even if it gave Lorna nightmares about being hunted.

Peter didn't worry about anyone coming to take him, no-one would believe what he could do anyway and if they did he could run laps around them, but Magda and Wanda collectively got him to worry about Lorna. If anything would happen, it was agreed that the twins should take Lorna and run, in case Magda had to stay to buy them time or they were separated.

"Mom. Mom you're being crazy paranoid, mom" Peter talked even faster when he was forced into some sort of serious conversation and tended to repeat himself. Wanda was holding the sleeve of his shirt which meant no leaving or zipping about while Magda was explaining rule 8 to the twins. From the look on Peters face he was in hell.

"I could like get you, Lorna and Wanda to like Mexico by the time they've gotten from the curb to the front door" he continued.

"No you couldn't" Wanda said sharply.

"Totally could"

"No, you idiot" Wanda flipped her long hair out of her face with an annoyed gesture "If you average around five seconds a mile it would take you over two hours to Mexico, and you'd have to make five trips to get us all"

"Wow, that sentence was like two hours" Peter stared at his twin for a quarter of a second before adding "Nerd", popping the "d".

"Mom, Peter is being ignorant about geography and the laws of physics!"

"Mom, Wanda is being unnecessarily litteral!"

"Stop it, both of you" Magda snapped, eyeing them each in turn across the kitchen table "Wanda, don't call your brother an idiot. Peter, don't be an idiot"

"Tell Wanda not to be a nerd!""Tell Peter to stop calling me a nerd!" The twins objected in unison.

"No-one is a nerd but I'm thinking you're both idiots right now" Magda said sternly, taking another puff on her cigarette "I want you to promise me you'll do as I say if anything would ever happen"

"We're not exactly helpless, mom" Wanda sounded incredibly bored, but Magda knew her well enough to know if was a defense mechanism she used when something made her uncomfortable.

"I don't care what you can and can't do. You run." Magda put the cigarette in an ashtray and reached out to grasp both the twins hands and held them as she continued "You promise me that you take your sister and you get as far away from whatever it is as possible"

"But..." they both protested in chorus.

"No. You promise me. You run and you stick together, no matter what" she had to fight to keep her tone assertive and not think about her brother who didn't manage to outrun the soldiers "Promise"

"Ok, fine, we promise! Cross our hearts and hope not to die" Peter shot off the words as if he couldn't get rid of them fast enough "Can we go now?"  
"We promise, mom" Wanda replied and Magda noticed a tinge of worry in her voice. Good.

As the twins left, Peter annoying Wanda by messing up her hair as he swooshed by, Magdas chest swelled with love for her unruly children. They were good kids, no matter what the other mothers on the street thought of them. She had raised good, smart, capable kids who loved each other.

Magda had her own two, secret rules, which she never wrote down because her elder children would simply roll their eyes and groan at them;

**Rule Number 9:** "Family is the most important thing in the world".

When Eric Lensherr appeared on television one evening, making claims about the future of man- and mutantkind, Magda was happy she had never written down that final rule for her kids to see. She looked at the back of Peters' head as he watched the television with uncharacteristic focus and silently repeated to herself "My kids are good kids. My kids are good kids". No matter who their dads were, no matter how much of a screw-up Magda had been through her life, she had raised good kids. Of this, she was certain, because:

**Rule number 10:** "Believe in them, no matter what"

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**Authors Notes:** After seeing X-men Days of Future Past I've been a little bit obsessed with Peters mom, like how do you handle a hyper-active super-powered child that thinks he's invincible? And add to that having two other children to care for, and one of them can warp reality to their liking, how do you deal with that as a parent? I assumed strict ground rules would need to be set in place. Hope you liked it, feedback is always welcome since English sin't my native language!


End file.
